1. Charles Sykes: Dear GOP, Some Scary Advice on How to Survive Your Impeachment Nightmare

By now it should have dawned on you that there is no escape. You are going to have to render a verdict not just on Donald’s Trump’s policies, but on his personal conduct. For just the third time in U.S. history, the Senate will hold a trial on the impeachment and removal of a president.

You’ll have to vote up or down and your decision will have consequences that will linger long past this election cycle. The situation is already grim.

Short term, breaking with Trump will spark a nasty blowback. But imagine for a moment a post-Trumpian Republican Party freed from the baggage of Trumpist corruption. The choice is between a party inextricably tied to Trump, with all of his crudity, dishonesty, lawlessness and arrogance, and a party that has shown that it is capable of being a principled defender of constitutional norms.

At the end of this process, the simple narrative is likely to be that the president has abused his power, broken the law and sold out his country. You have an opportunity to hold him accountable by doing your constitutional duty. History will want to know whether you got scared and shirked it. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/10/29/gop-advice-impeachment-nightmare-trump-229885

2. Michael Scherer: Trump wages battle against impeachment with a barrage of provocations, contradictions and exhortations

As the first full month of his impeachment investigation began to wane, President Trump unleashed a rhetorical onslaught. 

He announced that his Democratic rivals are “crazy,” “hate our country” and “want to destroy America.”

He apparently called the House speaker “a third-grade politician” to her face, labeled his GOP critics “human scum,” knocked his first defense secretary as “the world’s most overrated general” and argued that the Kurdish people of northern Syria “are no angels” as they faced Turkish invasion and fears of possible genocide.

Without the luxury of undivided attention, anyone who tried to follow the bouncing ball of Trump’s hourly utterances and tweets was doomed to fail, and there is no relief on the horizon. Simply tracking the provocations, contradictions and exhortations that fill the average day of this president can be an overwhelming task.

Trump dazzles and misdirects, prods and pokes, changes topics mid-sentence and frequently offers claims that are on their face so bizarre that they demand repetition by the media, if only to be discounted. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-wages-battle-against-impeachment-with-a-barrage-of-provocations-contradictions-and-exhortations/2019/10/24/078c7d82-f43c-11e9-ad8b-85e2aa00b5ce_story.html

3. Benjamin Hart: President Trump Is Obsessed With Stealing Syria’s Oil 

There is one thing about the chaotic situation in Syria that does seem to preoccupy the president: oil. Precious, precious oil. Over the past weeks, through tweets and public statements, he has made it clear that he considers the protection of it a very high priority.

CNN reported on Thursday that the U.S. would send tanks and troops to an area of eastern Syria to reinforce Kurdish defenses guarding oil fields there. As The Guardian notes, “It is quite likely it would take more troops to deploy, maintain, supply and protect armored units in the middle of the eastern Syrian desert than the roughly 1,000 that were in the country before the Turkish invasion.”

The question of why the U.S. has the right to another country’s oil — especially as it is supposedly completely withdrawing from that country — has received surprisingly little attention amid the ongoing disaster in Syria. But the notion that American’s central goal in the Middle East is plunder of natural resources recalls conspiracy theories around the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And Trump’s current obsession with this point recalls his own sentiments about that war (which he falsely claims not to have supported). In 2013, Trump tweeted, “I still can’t believe we left Iraq without the oil.” Axios reported last year that Trump repeatedly floated the ludicrous idea to Iraq’s prime minister that the country should repay the U.S. — in oil — for the favor of having invaded it.

As the Kurds try to regroup amid the death and destruction around them, they can comfort themselves by knowing that the commander-in-chief of their erstwhile ally has his heart in the right place. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/president-trump-is-obsessed-with-stealing-syrias-oil.html

4. Eric Levitz: Rising Seas Are Going to Drown Way More Cities Than We’d Thought

Climate change will bring (and has already brought) a wide variety of menacing disruptions to human existence. Some of these are well-known and already operative, like the wildfires that have been racing along California’s freeways or the perpetual droughts that have been immiserating Mediterranean farmers. Others are more obscure, like the higher rates of interpersonal and geopolitical violence a warming climate is expected to bring (social science suggests that high temperatures make human blood figuratively boil).

But none of the challenges posed by our warming climate has loomed larger in the popular imagination than sea-level rise. With global populations and wealth heavily concentrated in low-lying coastal cities, humanity has been preoccupied by the prospect of the oceans reclaiming the high points of our civilization. And for good reason: The best available models suggest that 37 million people currently live in places that will be below high tide by 2050 — in an optimistic low-carbon-emissions scenario.

Or rather, that’s what such models suggested before this week. On Tuesday, a new study revealed that those alarming statistics — which had gotten so many of us all worked up about our favorite cities’ impending doom — were wildly inaccurate.

The actual impacts of sea-level rise are going to be much, much worse. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/rising-seas-are-going-to-drown-more-cities-than-wed-thought.html

5. Amanda Marcotte: Trump and Barr's big counterattack: Actually, they're still covering up the Russia conspiracy

As the New York Times reported late Thursday, the Justice Department, which Barr took over after Trump ran out previous Attorney General Jeff Sessions for failing to fully evacuate himself of all remaining traces of integrity, has opened a criminal investigation into the origins of the Russian investigation run by Mueller.

Remember this: Mueller uncovered a vast Russian conspiracy that pulled off something the Watergate burglars never could. Russians or their allies successfully stole information from Democratic Party officials that was used to bolster conspiracy theories that eventually cost the Democratic nominee the election. Mueller also discovered that Trump knew about this conspiracy, encouraged it publicly, and attempted to get involved but apparently failed —probably because the Russians concluded he was unreliable, and involving him was more trouble than it was worth. Mueller also discovered that Trump conducted a lengthy campaign to cover up the Russian conspiracy, resulting in a list of 10 incidents that, if Trump were not protected by his office, could result in federal charges of obstruction of justice.

Just because the Mueller investigation is over doesn't mean Trump's efforts to cover up for Vladimir Putin's campaign against democracy have ended. On the contrary, the obstruction of justice campaign has expanded. Now, under the guidance of Barr, it's being run by the Department of Justice itself. https://www.salon.com/2019/10/25/trump-and-barrs-big-counterattack-actually-theyre-still-covering-up-the-russia-conspiracy/

6. Zak Cheney-Rice: Republicans Want Victimhood Without Being Victimized

On Wednesday morning, a group of Republican lawmakers stormed the Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or “SCIF,” where members of the House Oversight, Intelligence, and Foreign Affairs Committees were deposing a witness as part of the impeachment inquiry into President Trump. Led by Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman seen previously peddling the conspiracy theory that George Soros is bankrolling migrant caravans from Central America, between 25 and 30 of them occupied the room for several hours in protest, with several asking to be arrested. (None of them were.)

The absurdity of Gaetz & Co.’s posturing was recognized immediately as it unfolded on Wednesday. When GOP Representative Mark Meadows walked past Democrat Jamie Raskin that same afternoon, Raskin quipped to him, “Good to see you! Haven’t seen you since you became a Freedom Rider!” Democrat Eric Swalwell wrote on Twitter, “I’ve always thought telling my children I served with civil rights icons like John Lewis & Elijah Cummings would be the highlight of my time in Congress. But now, I can share the time Matt Gaetz, Louie Gohmert, & Steve King sat in an air-conditioned SCIF and ate pizza for 5 hrs.” The disconnect is indeed ironic. But it should also be taken seriously as a crucial tool for sustaining conservative politics. The public understanding of past civil-rights protests — particularly those against Jim Crow — is that they were righteous crusades against injustices imposed downward by the powerful. But today’s Republicans have found a much easier and more convenient work-around toward the illusion of the same rectitude: Protest like you’re powerless while keeping all the power. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/republicans-scif-protest-and-the-politics-of-victimhood.html

7. Eric Levitz: Recapping Impeachment: Bill Taylor Returns for One Last Mission

All great works of drama feature a memorable, show-stealing pair of clowns — your Rosencrantzes and Gildensterns, your Vladimirs and Estragons. In the drama of Ukraine-gate (a.k.a Ukraine-ghazi, a.k.a. Uncle Rudy’s Wild Ride), the questing couple whose artful failures reveal the icy abyss deep in the heart of human existence is the Ukrainian-Floridian lawyer duo Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman.

Parnas and Fruman are the kind of guys you call “entrepreneurs” with very raised eyebrows; the kind of guys who scheme to sell liquified natural gas to a Ukranian state-owned energy company; the kind of guys, in other words, who are perfect informal associates of President Trump’s informal diplomatic channel in Ukraine. Through big-dollar donations to the GOP — and payments to Rudy — the allegedly Russian mob-affiliated Parnas and Fruman secured clout with congressional Republicans, and meetings with Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr. at Mar-a-Lago. They used that influence to push for the firing of Ukraine ambassador Marie Yovanovitch (whom they deemed insufficiently cooperative in advancing their business goals), and advertised their ties to Trump when trying to sell Ukranian energy executives on the merits of their gas deal. Meanwhile, they did the president a solid by imploring Ukranian prosecutors to investigate Joe Biden.

Throughout this time, by the way, Parnas is posting photos of himself hanging out with Rudy and Trump to Instagram, making it, uh, not particularly credible when Trump says, “I don’t know them. I don’t know about them. I don’t know what they do.” For future reference, if you’re an Eastern European natural-gas entrepreneur who has a personal note of thanks from the president, post it to Stories, not the grid.

Alas, Parnas and Fruman couldn’t move their gas. And in pursuit of that ill-fated deal, they allegedly illegally funneled millions of dollars to former Texas Republican congressman Pete Sessions’s reelection campaign, which recently got them arrested on campaign-finance violation charges. Whoops! http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/impeachment-recap-lev-parnas-igor-fruman-and-bill-taylor.html

8. Max Boot: It’s impossible to give the Trump administration the benefit of the doubt

When previous administrations took controversial steps, there was a general assumption, even among critics, that they were acting in what they believed to be the public interest. When this administration makes contentious decisions — such as awarding a $10 billion Pentagon contract to Microsoft instead of Amazon, or probing the origins of an investigation into Russia’s attack on the 2016 election — the presumption of goodwill has been replaced by a presumption of ill will and illegality.

If that sounds harsh, you haven’t been paying attention. Trump’s relations with Ukraine show how he operates. There is now overwhelming evidence — not least from the president’s own mouth — that he held up military aid to Ukraine and a meeting with Ukraine’s president over a demand that Ukraine manufacture dirt on former vice president Joe Biden and information clearing Russia of 2016 hacking. This would be not just an impeachable offense but, as Philip Zelikow of the University of Virginia argues, an attempt to solicit a bribe in violation of federal law. But wait — there’s a second layer of corruption too! Trump delegated Ukraine policy to his personal lawyer, Rudolph Giuliani, who was trying to drum up business in Ukraine with two shady characters who have now been arrested. Giuliani’s own business practices are under investigation by federal prosecutors.

This seaminess is entirely in character for a president who was surrounded by felons (his previous personal attorney, his first national security adviser and his former campaign chairman); lied about his payments to an alleged mistress in apparent violation of campaign finance laws; engaged in pervasive obstruction of justice to stymie an investigation into his campaign links with Russia; continues to do business as a property manager and developer around the world; lies 22 times a day; and even falsified a weather map to show that he was right about a hurricane. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/26/its-impossible-give-trump-administration-benefit-doubt/

9. Jonathan Chait: Trump Boasts of War Crimes in Public, Nobody Believes Him

Over the last two and a half years, the once-vast space between Donald Trump’s authoritarian vision of the presidency and the effective powers at his disposal has slowly collapsed. Trump used to wistfully pine for an Attorney General who would protect the president’s personal interests and even cover up his actual crimes, and now he has William Barr. He used to call for American foreign policy as a weapon of plunder, and now he tells the country he has done exactly that.

After telling an audience of police chiefs that the United States would not be a “policeman in this case of two countries that haven’t gotten along for centuries,” but we’re keeping the oil. “I’ve always said that. Keep the oil. $45 million dollars a month.”

As a candidate, Trump used to routinely riff on his desire to use American military to steal resources from smaller countries. “I would take the oil,” he would insist about the Iraq War. “In the old days, you know, when you had a war, to the victor belong the spoils. You go in. You win the war and you take it,” he would say.

This course of action is indisputably an international war crime, and probably a violation of American law as well. The entire basis for American alliances is the notion that the U.S. acts as a liberal superpower safeguarding global security within the framework of international law. There may be some dispute as to the proper boundaries of this authority — the Iraq War is a case where the U.S. stretched its authority to enforce the truce terms of the first Gulf War beyond the point that most U.S. allies could accept — but it was undertaken in the name of enforcing a U.N. weapons of destruction agreement. Sending troops in order to seize foreign resources is literally the policy method of Genghis Khan and Hitler. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/trump-keeping-oil-war-crimes-syria.html

10. James D. Walsh: ’The Force of Trump’s Lying Has Ruptured the Space-Time Continuum’: Steve Schmidt on Impeachment

There is an argument to be made that he is the most consequential president since FDR, because he is systematically unraveling, at an extremely fast pace, the U.S.-led global order that was architected by FDR, built by Harry Truman, and maintained from Eisenhower through Obama. And everywhere around the world, all of the countries and all of the groups that we don’t want to see winning on the field of geopolitics — Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, Al Qaeda, Russia, Turkey — are advancing while American interests are retreating.

He has completely remade the American presidency through his debasements of its traditions. He has pitted the country against each other in a cold civil war and he is the first president purposefully who, with each and every utterance, he seeks to incite and divide as opposed to unifying around core principles. He is attacking and degrading our institutions and the concepts of the rule of law that are necessary for the maintenance of the constitutional republic from within. He is utterly infidelitous to his oath to preserve, protect, and strengthen the Constitution of the United States. That makes him, not a clown and a joke, but a dangerous and profoundly consequential figure. I caveat “consequential” by saying it’s not a celebratory statement — it’s one of alarm. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/steve-schmidt-on-trump-impeachment-2020-and-howard-schultz.html

11. Matt Stieb: Trump’s Press Conference Announcing the Death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Is Peak Trump

The president, who appears to relish violet rhetoric, personal boasting, the defeat of his enemies, and the simplicity of a good vs. evil narrative, announced on Sunday morning that U.S. special forces had killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in a raid in northwestern Syria on Saturday. With such a natural lining up of his interests, Trump turned the event into a spectacle, even promoting the press conference on Twitter the night before.

Anytime President Trump speaks for 48 minutes straight, the appearance is going to get pretty unhinged — which, on Sunday, began about 90 seconds in, when he described the ISIS leader “whimpering and crying and screaming all the way” to the back of a tunnel in his compound, where he detonated a suicide vest as he was surrounded by three of his children. The president, who did little to hide his enjoyment in the moment, said that “it was just like a movie.”

Trump seemed to pursue a strategy of dehumanizing al-Baghdadi, the terrorist responsible for the Yazidi genocide, systemized sex slavery within ISIS-controlled territory, and the deaths of thousands in the region. “He was a gutless animal,” Trump said, later adding that “he died in a vicious and violent way, as a coward, running and crying.” He employed one of his frequent, if incoherent, jabs at al-Baghdadi, claiming that he “died like a dog.” In a bizarre piece of symmetry, as Trump degraded the terrorist, he elevated a military canine involved in the raid: “Our K-9, as they call it — I call it a dog, a beautiful dog, a talented dog — was injured and brought back, but we had no soldier injured … We had nobody even hurt. That’s why the dog was so great.”

Trump also took the occasion of his administration’s greatest national-security victory to date to celebrate himself. After explaining the Islamic State’s achievement in recruiting disaffected young men online, he complimented the terrorist organization: “You know, they use the internet better than almost anybody in the world, perhaps other than Donald Trump.” Then came a blur of sentences imaginable only by the president himself: “And what they’ve done with the internet through recruiting and everything — and that’s why he died like a dog, he died like a coward. He was whimpering, screaming and crying. And frankly that’s something that should be brought out.”

He also found a way to weave in a few historical retellings, claiming that “if you read about the history of Donald Trump, I was a civilian. I had absolutely nothing to do with going into Iraq and I was totally against it.” That’s a standard Trump lie, though the next one was new to the canon: “I wrote a book. A really very successful book. And in that book, about a year before the World Trade Center was blown up, I said there’s somebody named Osama bin Laden, you better kill him or take him out, something to that effect, he’s big trouble … And I’m saying to people, take out Osama bin Laden, that nobody ever heard of.”

President Trump was certainly aware of the moment looming from eight years ago — when President Obama more professionally announced the death of bin Laden — and maturely claimed that his terrorist death outdid that of his predecessor. “This is the worst ever,” he said. “Osama bin Laden was very big but Osama bin Laden became big with the World Trade Center. This is a man who built a whole — as he would like to call it — a country, a caliphate. And was trying to do it again.”

Dehumanizing enemies, claiming to upstage Obama, celebrating details of war like they existed only on television — the press conference seemed to hit peak Trump by the end, though his campaign soon added to the performance. Hours later, Trump was fundraising on the death of al-Baghdadi, making it doubtful that he will take the advice he gave during the 2012 election, when he suggested people stop congratulating Obama for the death of bin Laden. http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/10/trumps-deranged-conference-on-death-of-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi.html

12. Max Boot: Baghdadi’s death could have been Trump’s finest hour. He messed it up anyway.

President Trump has a preternatural ability to turn any occasion, no matter how solemn or important, into a ridiculous, risible spectacle. He did it again Sunday in announcing the death of Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. When he began to ad-lib about what happened near Idlib, Syria, he treated the world to his usual blend of braggadocio and bluster — dishonest and distasteful in equal measure.

A president who has never heard a shot fired in anger reveled in Baghdadi’s last moments, even claiming “he died like a coward … whimpering and crying and screaming all the way.” Trump could not possibly have heard “whimpering and crying” on the overhead imagery because there was no audio, and Defense Secretary Mark T. Esper and Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, pointedly refused to confirm those details.

Most likely Trump made up the vivid details about Baghdadi’s last moments, just as he made up his claim that he alone called for action against Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. “And I’m saying to people, take out Osama bin Laden, that nobody ever heard of,” Trump recounted. In reality, a ghostwritten book bearing Trump’s name, which came out in 2000, included a brief mention of bin Laden — already a world-famous terrorist who was being hunted by the U.S. government — but did not suggest killing him. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/28/al-baghdadis-death-could-have-been-trumps-finest-hour-he-messed-it-up-anyway/

13. Adam Weinstein: “Blood for Oil” Is Official U.S. Policy Now

In a vacuum, you might imagine that a populist nationalist president—a man who brands himself as a swamp-drainer and has been helpfully described by pundits as a “dove”—would argue that oil is not so precious as to be worth sending armed Americans overseas to “secure” its sources in perpetuity. But we are not in a vacuum; we are in Trump’s world of stupidity, avarice, and transactionality.

When asked if the Baghdadi operation—which was complicated by Trump’s unilateral withdrawal from northern Syria—gave him second thoughts about that withdrawal, he said it was about the oil. https://newrepublic.com/article/155507/blood-oil-official-us-policy-now